Benjamin Clementine is a balladeer with a backstory, from Catholic schoolboy in London to homeless in Paris. On the eve of the release of his new album, he tells Kate Mossman how music devoted him a voice

Benjamin Clementine looms above me, a strange but gentle presence. When he talks, he does so with dry amusement; when he listens, he furrows his forehead. In a photo studio in Acton, west London, his bright khaki suit induces him look like a soldier. In fact, it’s womenswear, the broad cuffs swinging high above his ankles.” Yes, they are short ,” he says, eyeing his trousers with a comic portentousness as we stroll down the stairs, before sparking up a Marlboro Light and smoking it in the rain.

He’s back in his home town, London, after a few months in America, where he appreciated the “can-do” position of his American fans. French fans he likes, too- because they love a good story. The English, he says, are harder to please.

After Clementine won the Mercury Prize in 2015 for his debut album At Least for Now , he came back to live in Edmonton , north London, where he was born, but speedily decided there was something pretentious about trying to be the prodigal son, when everything had changed and he’d grown so big. Literally: all through school, he was one of the smallest. When he left home at 17, he shot up; now he’s six foot four, and in the local shop where he used to buy his bus pass, he loomed above the freezer cabinets.

The back tale was unbelievable. He slept rough on the streets of London and Paris; he busked on the metro. He lived in a hostel, 10 people to one room, hiding his keyboard under the bottom bunk. He got spotted, then signed, and arrived fully formed upon the world with a voice unlike anyone else. They compared his tumbling musical poetry to that of Antony Hegarty and Nina Simone.

These days he treats his colorful biography with a certain shame. It’s perhaps not the Paris years which contain the key to who and how he is, but the murkier water of a suburban religious childhood. He may have worked with Damon Albarn this year, but he wouldn’t have

heard Parklife growing up in a strict Catholic household, where his Ghanaian parents banned their children from listening to popular music, wary of its “corrupting” influence. The church they attended was 20 seconds away from the family home; the priest lived next door.” No one put a gun to your head ,” he says of his churchgoing,” but it was pretty much an everyday instance .”

It is hard to imagine any parents could hope to protect five children from popular culture in 21 st century London.

” Believe you me ,” he says, in his strangely old-fashioned way,” It’s still possible. Seem at the Mormons. I appreciate it in some way, because I’ve been protected from certain things I might otherwise have done. I clearly recollect my father cutting our jumpers and our athletics clothes with scissors- because he didn’t want us to wear jogging bottoms and hoodies. He thought that would somehow defined the police on us .”

Instead, his father would buy cheap suits at a local charity shop for the boys. (” That’s helped my style a little bit, as well .”) On non-uniform days at school, he would wear his uniform. He was picked on for it- of course he was- but says,” I felt like it was my clothes; that I was the one who appeared different, with everyone wearing jeans .”

When Clementine guested on Gorillaz’s Hallelujah Money in January this year, the full extent of his musical oddness stretched out. There’s an increasing amount of Jacques Brel in his dramatic delivery; his sardonic expressions look like Grace Jones crossed with Skeletor.

Albarn, a man who wrote a monkey opera, was a suitable foil for Clementine, whose forthcoming album, I Tell a Fly , is the story of two flies in love, targeted against a backdrop of contemporary geopolitics. Clementine says of Albarn,” He could play the working day, and he always wants to play; and he’s eternally doing something with music, and he cannot stop .” He recorded his new album in Albarn’s studio and wanted him to make it, but was content with the gifts he gave him- the Polaris and Rhodes Chroma synths you hear on several tracks. He’d hated synths before, being more of a Debussy man.

” I wasn’t confident , no way ,” he says.” But music was meant to be shared. The people in the Bataclan were there to share an experience. So I supposed, I want to bring everyone on stage with me. I instinctively felt it was right .”

He has a rock star’s sense of sentence, but he doesn’t think people will buy his new album.” I don’t think it will sell ,” he grins.” It will not sell a lot of copies like the last one – sorry! I could have done something closer to the first album. But I said to myself,’ What are you doing this for ?'”

With I Tell a Fly , Clementine has taken a big risk. A self-produced, and mostly self-played record, there are rapid changes in texture, from rich African choruses to solo piano sonatas; from rousing Broadway tunes to spindly harpsichord sequences. Lyrics transformation from witticism to bleakness, a dozen places meshing together on one spinning musical globe. How did he get away with this stylistic free-for-all? Did he fight?

” I tried to use dark witticism to give the listeners a space to second-guess ,” he says.” My experiences are tiny, but they’ve affected me for many years. For children in England, bullying is the number one problem: they may watch the Ten O’Clock News and assure the bombing but it feels so far away. You must bring it home. I talk about Calais, but I’m actually talking about London .”

Underpinning the album are the ideas of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who wrote about the necessity of achieving “play” in both childhood and adult life. When we play, Winnicott said, we are our “real” selves- and find your real self allows you to get close to others. If parents don’t raise children to express their emotions, the “false” ego takes over- a mask of respectability, a defence.

” If you have parents who can’t present you love, a kid can grow up to look arrogant ,” Clementine says.” Because they need to create a fake ego. Or they think they’re more powerful than they genuinely are .”